Totalitarianism and Science
Totalitarianism and Science

The Nazi and the Soviet Experience

Author(s): David Holloway
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, History
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: Totalitarianism;
Summary/Abstract: Nazism and Stalinism constitute the core of the totalitarian experience. The term totalitarianism has been much discussed and much criticized, but it remains useful for distinguishing regimes that sought to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over society. As François Furet has written, “both regimes, and they alone, set in motion the destruction of the civil order by the absolute submission of individuals to the ideology and terror of the party-state.” To put these two regimes into the category of totalitarianism is not to suggest that they were identical or comparable in every way, but rather to indicate that they were different from other authoritarian regimes by virtue of the degree of control they sought to exercise over society and by the pervasive role of ideology and terror in their methods of rule. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the Stalin years were leaders in science, and this naturally prompts the question: What was the relationship between science and totalitarianism?

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